BOB ABERNETHY, host: Welcome, I’m Bob Abernethy. It’s good to have you with us. Today, a special report on the events and issues we see ahead in 2011. We do this with the help of Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, Kevin Eckstrom of Religion News Service, and E.J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution, the Washington Post, and Georgetown University. Before we begin our discussion, as we close out the first decade of the new millennium we remember some of the stories that set the stage for the news we expect to cover in 2011 and beyond. Our managing editor Kim Lawton took a look back at the events of the last decade.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were perhaps the defining moment of the decade, and the repercussions are still being felt on many fronts. In the wake of the tragedy, mainstream Muslim leaders tried to spread a message that Islam is not synonymous with terrorism. But those efforts were complicated by an expanding extremist movement that recruits over the Internet, as well as several high-profile arrests of Muslims plotting more attacks. American Muslims worked to define their place in US society, but many felt unfairly targeted by enhanced security measures and what they saw as a rising tide of Islamophobia. President Obama made improving relations with the Muslim world one of the priorities of his new administration.

The 9/11 attacks led to American involvement in long and difficult wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Religious and ethical leaders debated whether each conflict was just. President George W. Bush argued for a doctrine of preventive war, the idea that it was moral to attack a country to prevent it from attacking us first. The ethical debates intensified with revelations that the US was using torture as a means of getting information. After thousands of deaths of troops and civilians, President Obama announced the end of combat operations in Iraq and the intention to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan.

Economic crises dominated much of the end of the decade as recession, unemployment and foreclosures took a toll on faith-based groups and the people they serve. Religious institutions were forced to slash their budgets and lay off staff even as they were asked to do more to help needy people.

Religion continued to be a potent force in politics. In 2000 and 2004, President Bush rallied religious conservatives. He set up a new White House office to expand government partnerships with faith-based social service organizations. Analysts spoke of a God gap, with voters seeing the Democratic Party as unfriendly toward religion. In the run-up to the 2008 elections, Democrats and the Obama campaign developed an unprecedented outreach to compete for religious votes. Many in that faith coalition were disappointed the Democrats didn’t build on the momentum in the 2010 midterm elections. Meanwhile, religious conservatives were energized by the Tea Party movement and vowed new activism leading up to the 2012 elections. Religious groups across the spectrum were involved in policy debates, from health care to immigration and gay marriage.

Issues surrounding homosexuality provoked bitter debates within religious institutions and American society as a whole. The 2003 election of Gene Robinson as the first openly gay bishop in the US Episcopal Church brought the worldwide Anglican Communion to the brink of schism, even as other denominations continue to debate the role of gay clergy. In 2003, Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, with four other states and the District of Columbia following suit. The issue continues to work its way through the courts.

For the Roman Catholic Church, a dramatic changing of the guard with the 2005 death of John Paul II, who had been pope for more than 25 years, and the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. For the US Catholic Church, much of the decade was focused on addressing a massive clergy sex abuse crisis, enacting new guidelines to prevent abuse, and confronting litigation that saw more than two billion dollars in payouts to victims. In 2010, the clergy abuse scandal exploded across many parts of Europe and posed new challenges to the Vatican and top church leaders.

The new millennium began with a sense of relief that a predicted Y2K computer meltdown never materialized. It ends with the development of social media like Facebook and Twitter offering new online possibilities for personal connection and outreach, enabling information to be disseminated at lightning speed—both for good and for ill.

ABERNETHY: Kim, many thanks for that. Welcome to you, to Kevin Eckstrom, and to E.J. Dionne. E.J., we have a new Congress, Republican control of the House, more Republican votes in the Senate. Walk us through that a little bit. What do you expect that will mean for some of the social issues that are of most concern to religious communities?

EJ DIONNE (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution): You know, watching Kim’s set-up piece I was thinking of Yogi Berra’s great line: ‘Predictions are hard, especially when they’re about the future.” And who would have imagined a decade unfolding the way this last decade just unfolded? So I think we’re all in a difficult situation here. I think when you look forward to this Congress, so much of it is not going to be about social issues. The last Democratic Congress kind of acted to get some of those out of the way, notably don’t ask don’t tell. I think they really wanted that through because they knew it was going to be very difficult this time over. You may have some debate about abortion around the healthcare bill. Republicans want to repeal it. I don’t think they’ll be able to but they going to have a variety of ways of trying to hem in President Obama in sort of putting it into effect. So I think you may see it there. I think one of the sleeper issues will be fights we might have around the National Endowment of the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, where you have, if nothing else for purely political reasons it’s a question where conservatives can talk about it as an economic issue: should we be spending the money? But there are always issues related to cultural values that get into those debates. So I suspect you are going to see some of those arguments around the humanities and arts endowments. Personally, I hope it doesn’t happen that way, but I think that is going to happen.

ABERNETHY: How about immigration?

LAWTON: Well, I was going to say that I am going to be watching to see how some of the evangelical political activists maneuver with the Tea Party politicians that got elected. You know, in this last election there was so much talk about how the Tea Party was so ascendant and there were a lot of religious conservatives that were supportive of the Tea Party. But when you get to issues like immigration or some of the other issues involving a social safety net for the poor, evangelicals don’t always line up as economic conservatives. And so while they might be hoping for some action on abortion or maybe even some of the gay marriage type issues—I don’t know that that’s going to come up in Congress, but I’m going to be watching some of the economic issues that do have some moral implications to see how much evangelicals, and some Catholics who were supportive of the Tea Party—where they come down.

ECKSTROM (Editor, Religious New Service): Right, and there are a lot of moral issues that a lot of religious groups care about. And so I think what you’re going to have is maybe a different set than what we’ve seen in the last couple years. Whereas under the Democratic Congress we were talking about moral issues like the environment and the minimum wage increase and things like that, you’re probably not going to see as much of that with a Republican House. Instead, you’ll have issues that maybe more conservatives tend to latch on to. But it’s not that these social issues are going to disappear, it’s just that there are going to be a different set of them.

DIONNE: That’s a good point, because you are going to talking more and more about budget deficits and cuts in government programs, and I think it’s going to be fascinating to see how religious groups that sometimes seem to be aligned with conservatives on some of the cultural questions are actually going to be saying no, you can’t cut this program for the poor or that program for the poor, because there are a lot of Catholics, a lot of evangelicals, and many in the rest of the religious community—mainline Protestants, Jews, Muslims—who really want to protect some of those programs. So I think their voices are actually going to be very important at a time of budget stress.

ECKSTROM: And one issue I think that’s worth watching that we’ve already seen indications of is that House Republicans want to hold hearings on American Muslims and the radicalization of American Muslims – sort of home-grown terror threats – and what’s going wrong within American Islam that it’s allowing this to happen? So it’s a different kind of religious issue but one that’s already going to be on Congress’s agenda.

ABERNETHY: Before we leave that, E.J., what about the tone, the spirit that you expect. Is it going to be awful?

DIONNE: I’m not very optimistic that we’re going to see an outbreak of comity and friendship across party lines. On the Muslim hearings, having Congress sort of investigate a religious group in the country raises all kinds of questions, which I hope get raised. I’m not sure that the deal that President Obama reached with the Republicans on taxes can be easily replicated across other issues. After all, tossing out about $858 billion is a lot easier than cutting $400 billion or whatever they decide to do. So I think it’s going to be a very difficult couple of years.

LAWTON: And also, sort of in the backdrop, this coming year in politics is going to be the run up to the 2012 presidential election, and so that’s going to be complicating anything anyone wants to get done because there’s going to be a lot of posturing as people try to set themselves up for the next presidential election.

DIONNE: Which brings us to some very interesting debates inside the Republican Party. Your point about the Tea Party and the Christian conservatives overlapping but distinct groups—how are they going to play those roles inside the Republican fight for the nomination?

LAWTON: And a lot of religious conservatives were very unhappy with the Republican establishment, felt like they took them for granted, Republicans took the religious conservatives for granted—wanted them to come out and work and vote but didn’t necessarily take care of their issues. It will be interesting to see whether they feel the same way about the Tea Party as well.

ABERNETHY: And back on this question of tone, everything perhaps is going to be made more dramatic by the fact that it’s going to be, this year, the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

LAWTON: It’s hard to believe that it was almost 10 years ago when those attacks happened and that really did set up a lot of difficult issues for us as a country, both in terms of the war and as well as in terms of interfaith relations. I know a lot of Muslim groups are sort of bracing after seeing in the previous year a lot of protests against mosques and things of that nature. They’re concerned about the atmosphere and a lot of Muslims I’m talking with are worried about what’s going to happen leading up to the 9/11 anniversary.

ABERNETHY: But Kevin, you or E.J. have made the point that we have this real problem of trying to deal with homegrown terrorism and terrorism here that just emerges out of the suburbs some place, and on the other hand protecting the civil rights of a whole group of people.

ECKSTROM: This is a huge challenge for American Muslims and one of the big debates within the American Muslim community right now is how much do they cooperate with law enforcement on trying to prevent these sorts of attacks that nobody wants to see? How much should parents report their kids if they’re acting strangely or going to bad Web sites or talking in radical terms? And there’s a lot of Muslims who are afraid of being entrapped by the FBI and being led into plots that they might not otherwise do. But then they also know that if they don’t report them nobody else is going to and if there’s an attack, things are only going to get worse.

DIONNE: You’ve got tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Muslims living in American suburbs, living middle-class lives, and if one or two or three or five of those thousands of kids is discovered to get involved in terrorism, suddenly we’re talking about these very middle-class, classically American places being breeding grounds for terrorism. I think one thing that is going to sort encourage that is if we make this big American Muslim middle class feel excluded from the rest of us, and we’re really going to have to think that through. Of course we don’t want home-grown terrorism, but we’re nowhere like where the Europeans are, because we have this great tradition of upward mobility and inclusion in our country.

LAWTON: And this has been a challenge for American Muslims themselves within their communities. If we launch programs to combat homegrown terrorism, homegrown extremism, if we launch programs in our mosques, does that appear like we’re giving in to the stereotype that all Muslims are potential terrorists, and so they’ve really struggled within their community how to approach this problem. They want to look proactive. They want to look like they’re addressing this as good, loyal Americans, but how do you do that without giving into the perception?

ABERNETHY: Kevin, what do you expect to happen with the cultural center/mosque near Ground Zero?

ECKSTROM: Well, it’s going to be a challenge. They presumably have all of the zoning things that they need. They’ve got their permits and the city is going to allow them to build it. What they’re missing right now is the money. And it’s going to take them a while to raise as much money as they’re going to need, but it’s also going to be difficult to get, I think, a lot of people to support that because that center is so radioactive and it’s generated so much heat that there’s going to be a lot of people who maybe don’t want their names associated with it. And on the flip side, there’s a lot of Americans who don’t want the money coming from some foreign anonymous donor somewhere, so they have a big challenge there.

ABERNETHY: Now you were referring earlier to the fact that the beginning of 2011 may well seem like the beginning of the election campaign of 2012, E.J.

DIONNE: Right, and I think you’re going to see some sort of interesting positioning inside the Republican Party. I mean, we still don’t know if Sarah Palin is or is not going to run for president. Sarah Palin seems to be more representative of the Tea Party side of the right, although she has clearly some Christian conservative support. Mike Huckabee is going to be competing with her as the spokesperson for Christian conservatives, but every Republican running for president wants a piece of that vote, because it is such an important vote in the Republican primaries, and that’s going to start right now. It’s already started, before the show went on the air.

ECKSTROM: And I think something worth watching there is Mitt Romney, who is at the front of a lot of these polls, these straw polls, whether or not he tries to make the case about his Mormon faith again with the evangelical base. A lot of people say, you know, he did that; he doesn’t need to do it again. Other people say that he’s never going to win them over; there’s a certain amount of the base that’s just never going to accept a Mormon candidate. So I think it will be interesting to watch how he navigates the Mormon question.

ABERNETHY: And meanwhile, E.J., every pundit worth his salt is giving Obama advice about what he needs to do, how he needs to change himself, how he needs to change his language. Talk about that.

DIONNE: Well, the range of advice goes from you must be nicer to the Republicans and look like you’re a centrist to you’re political and moral obligation is to confront these guys and have a big argument so that the issues can be clear to the country. And I think he’s going to try to do a little of the former to say I’ve reached out my hand to them, and when the hand is rejected on certain issues, he’s going to flip to the second. But I think one of the things to look for is whether he does speak more in a moral and spiritual language both about himself and the underpinnings of his policies, but also about this sense of America can grab its position in the world back after a period when Americans felt we were in decline. I think there’s going to be some John Kennedy-esque rhetoric coming out him getting the country moving again in the coming year.

LAWTON: And the Democratic Party is going to have to figure out what it wants to do in terms of faith-based outreach. There was a lot of criticism from Democrats about how the party handled that in the last midterm elections and a lot of faith-based moderates and liberals and even some conservatives that don’t consider themselves Republicans felt that the party didn’t do enough to reach out to them, so that’s going to be something they’re trying to figure out as well.

ABERNETHY: Meanwhile the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan is supposed to begin n 2011. What are your expectations there?

LAWTON: Well, there’s some really difficult ethical debates still lingering in terms of what America leaves behind in Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of civil society and …

ABERNETHY: And safety and protection for the people who helped us.

LAWTON: Exactly. Religious minorities and people who were seen as being part of the American offensive—what’s going on with them and what responsibility does America have within that? And those are going to be difficult questions. I’ve been surprised how little the religious community has been focusing on these issues of war. It seemed like last year, in the last election, people just didn’t really talk about those ethical, moral issues.

ECKSTROM: And, you know, we’ve heard a lot of talk about the president’s problem with his base—you know, the liberal base is dissatisfied for any number of reasons. But it’s worth remembering that a good chunk of that base voted for him because he said he was going to close Guantanamo Bay, and it’s still open, and that he said he’d get us out of Afghanistan, and he actually sent more troops in. So there’s, I think, some ethical problems that he faces in terms of not moving fast enough on that issue.

DIONNE: Actually, he said he’d get us out of Iraq, and he said Afghanistan was the good war, and we’ll presumably continue to pull out of Iraq. My hunch is that if we have a withdrawal this year from Afghanistan it’s going to be very small. It’s clear that the new timeline that the administration wants seems to be 2014. And there’s going to be some opposition in his own party to not withdrawing more quickly. I also think some of the new conservatives who are less interventionist in Congress may also be a surprising opposition to a long commitment there.

ABERNETHY: Let me ask you to look at Europe and the Vatican. What do you expect there in terms of this ongoing struggle about the sex abuse of kids by priests? Anybody?

DIONNE: Everyone is silent.

ECKSTROM: Happy topic. Well, this pope has the unfortunate possibility of his legacy being presiding over this sex abuse scandal that reared its ugly head—that the church didn’t learn anything from the first time around. And I think he has made some progress in sort of admitting that the church needs to do some introspection and figure out what went wrong so that we don’t make this happen again. But the pope is going to be 84 in 2011. I don’t know how much more time he has left in that job, but probably a few years, and I think he’s going to be doing some legacy-making, because this is now at the point where he can still do some things and see what happens.

LAWTON: Well, so many people in the church are frustrated because they want to get beyond this issue but they just can’t do it, and so that’s been something they’ve all had to confront.

DIONNE: I think it’s sort of an argument between people who defend the Vatican and the church say look, they understand, they’ve tried to fix this, they’ve made some moves versus others who say that they still haven’t fully taken responsibility for changing the structures of the church. It’s a classic argument between more conservative or traditionalist people and people looking for greater change in the church because they think it needs it, and I think that is an ongoing struggle and that the sex abuse scandal is a piece of that larger struggle.

ABERNETHY: Our time is almost up, but before we quit, in this coming year do you see something happening or that might happen or do you see some person that you’re going to be paying particular attention to?

LAWTON: Well, we should also point out that last year a lot of the things we discussed we didn’t predict. So, as E.J. said, it’s hard to know that. I think it is going to be a pivotal year for religious groups and issues surrounding homosexuality, whether we’re talking court cases around gay marriage or whether we’re talking denominations still really struggling over how to handle gay clergy and gay bishops. And the Anglican Communion, which has really been torn about by this subject, is also going to have to face some tough questions this coming year.

ECKSTROM: I’m going to keep an eye on Archbishop Tim Dolan in New York, who is the new president of the Catholic bishops conference. He’s a media-savvy guy, he gives you a bear hug, he’s sort of a telegenic face for the church. But he’s no shrinking violet. He will take on the issues of the day, but in sort of a friendly kind of way. It will be interesting. The only real power he has is the power of the megaphone, and which issues he chooses for the bishops to emphasize.

DIONNE: I think that’s an excellent selection. I would say if I could combine Palin, Huckabee, Obama, Romney—we’re going to see if the nature of the discussion of religion in our politics changes substantially this year or not. As we’ve already said, there are challenges to each of those figures, and it will be interesting to see how they deal with it.

ABERNETHY: I have been wondering with respect to Iraq and now Afghanistan why there was no peace movement—not more of a peace movement. Do you think with Afghanistan, as we begin to come out of there, that there will be such a thing?

DIONNE: I think going into Afghanistan there was very broad support when we started because many people, except for pacifists and a few others who have legitimate reasons for opposing all war, most people thought this was kind of a just war response, so you didn’t have a big opposition. I think now a lot of people say God, this is a terrible mess. I don’t have a good answer coming out of it, and I think that sort of undercuts what might otherwise be a big peace movement.

]]>“There is some new energy for religious conservatives that’s growing out of the Tea Party,” says George Mason University political scientist Mark Rozell. He calls the relationship between the two groups “mutually reinforcing, even though they are not necessarily all the same people.” Watch more of Kim Lawton’s interview with him about the Tea Party and religious conservatives.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Do you think that the history that we have a lot of in this country was written by liberals?

DON MCLEROY: Oh, absolutely, yes.

SEVERSON: Don McLeroy has been practicing dentistry for over 30 years, and until recently he was chairman of the Texas school board—the board that stirred up a hornet’s nest with its efforts to amend Texas history books for the state’s nearly 5 million students.

MCLEROY: Some people characterize, oh, we’re making our standards lean to the right, oh my gosh, you know. The left has dominated a lot of history.

Don McLeroy

SEVERSON: Barbara Cargill has been on the board 6 years. She teaches science to children and agrees with McLeroy on most issues.

BARBARA CARGILL: We want to take all of the content that liberal publishers might have and want to pour into the classroom, and we serve as the filter for the parents and students and the teachers to kind of make sure that what gets through is really the best information.

SEVERSON: There are 15 state school board members here in Texas—ten Republican, five Democrat. They’re elected to four-year terms, and every ten years they’re required to reevaluate and make any changes they deem necessary to Texas textbooks. But never before have there been so many changes, almost all of them from Republican members—changes that ignore many of the recommendations Texas history teachers were mandated to make and spent a year compiling.

This is Mary Helen Berlanga, a lawyer and a Democrat who has been on the school board longer than any other member.

(speaking to Mary Helen Berlanga): Have you ever had anything like this in your 27 years?

MARY HELEN BERLANGA: No, never, and I think if you look over the 300 amendments you’re going to see that it is pretty much a rewrite of the original book that was given to us.

SEVERSON: It’s difficult for outsiders and even board members to make sense of all the amendments that have been offered, but most agree they paint conservatives and conservative values in a more favorable light. They extol the virtues of free enterprise and American foreign policy and emphasize that this country was built on Christian principles.

MCLEROY: I would like to see the importance of religion to make sure that the role it played in the founding of our country and the acknowledgment of the founders’ dependence upon God that they wrote into the documents to make sure that that’s clearly presented.

CARGILL: I am the mother of two Eagle Scouts myself, so it was very important to me that a lot of the values would be upheld in the social studies curriculum, and so throughout the elementary standards you will see that our teachers are now required to teach their students about truthfulness, respect for oneself and for others, holding elected officials to their word, the duty that it is to vote, and you will see this language used over and over again starting in kindergarten and going through the 4th grade.

SEVERSON: Mary Helen Berlanga, like the other Democrats on the board, is a minority, and she argues that the contributions and treatment of minorities in Texas are “whitewashed” in the proposed standard changes.

BERLANGA: When it comes to the section on civil rights, they do not have anything that is specific to the Mexican-American experience.

Mary Helen Berlanga

SEVERSON: In Texas.

BERLANGA: In Texas. The Mexican Americans were discriminated against. They weren’t allowed in theaters to buy popcorn and their drink to watch the movie until everyone else was seated, in some parts of the state. Mexican Americans were not allowed to go into a restaurant and eat because on the outside it would say “No Mexicans allowed, no dogs, no Negroes.”

PROFESSOR FRITZ FISCHER (Chairman, National Council for History Education): It’s very disturbing. I’m very concerned for the kids in Texas, the students in Texas.

SEVERSON: Fritz Fischer is a history professor at the University of Northern Colorado and chairman of the National Council for History Education. He believes board members should not be the ones to change history.

FISCHER: Standards should be written with people who work with the kids every day, who are professionally trained to do this sort of thing, and the government shouldn’t be dictating, the political leaders shouldn’t be dictating what is taught in the classroom.

Prof. Fritz Fischer

SEVERSON: When Professor Fischer refers to the government, he’s speaking of the elected school board members. He says most boards around the country make only a few changes to those submitted by the experts. McLeroy himself added about 60 amendments.

MCLEROY: Conservatives on our board are the only ones—the Christian conservatives—that are able to sit there and to think for themselves and say, well, wait. Is this really good policy? Should we just trust what’s being brought to us? Should we just rubber-stamp it?

SEVERSON: Some amendments were simply to change words or terminology. What was “democratic societies” becomes “constitutional republics.” “Capitalism” is no longer in favor. The preferred term is “free enterprise.”

BERLANGA: One of the right-wing fanatics said that capitalism had a bad connotation—that people referred to us as a “capitalist pig.”

SEVERSON: Lawrence Allen, a Democrat board member and an educator with two masters degrees, opposes changing the word “capitalism.”

LAWRENCE ALLEN JR: I think there are a number of citizens today who say, well, I don’t have a job, I don’t have any money, so I don’t know how wonderful the free enterprise system has been. I think that capitalism and these systems have made some of our citizens very fat and a large number of them very thin, and so I don’t favor that at all.

SEVERSON: The teachers review committee recommended changing the word “expansionism,” as in American expansionism, to “imperialism.” The board rejected “imperialism.”

FISCHER: And there’s no other way you can explain, for example, the United States taking over Hawaii. Now eventually Hawaii becomes a state. Eventually it’s integrated into the United States. But originally in the nineteenth century it was clearly imperialism. There’s no other way to explain it.

SEVERSON: The board’s majority added an amendment that seems to justify the dark years of the McCarthy era. They believe documents known as the Venona Papers confirm suspicions of communist infiltration of the US government.

FISHER: The way the standard is written, as far as I’ve seen it so far, says that they must include information that exonerates McCarthy. In point of fact the documents they’re referring to do no such thing.

CARGILL: One of the chapters in this US history book was called “Nightmare at Omaha,” and some of the board members were very concerned about what was covered on this page—Americans landing at Omaha Beach.

SEVERSON: So board members met with the book publisher and got the title changed from ‘Nightmare at Omaha” to “A Day for Heroes.”

CARGILL: The details of the battle are still here. However, because of the sacrifices made that day by our American soldiers we want our students to learn that these men were truly heroes, and so it changes the tone that the teacher uses in the classroom, or if a student is reading a textbook it changes their whole mindset, and this is what we want.

FISCHER: Theoretically something like this could happen from the left some day as well as from the right. It’s to focus on what is good history teaching, and what is the purpose of history in the classroom? It’s to teach judgment and critical thinking. It’s not to teach a particular political version of the past.

MCLEROY: They need to have an accurate view of history. Accuracy, balance, free of bias, and I’ll vote for that every day of the week.

SEVERSON: He won’t be voting much longer, at least not on the board. McLeroy was defeated in the recent election, but he’ll continue to serve through the remainder of the year. The amendment process is not over yet. The Texas School Board meets one more time.

SEVERSON: Might there still be more amendments then?

CARGILL: Absolutely, yeah.

SEVERSON: Allen believes there may be far-reaching consequences to the board’s final vote.

ALLEN: There are other elected officials that are watching this who are saying that maybe the state board has run its course because of some of what they call hijacking the public curriculum, and so there are state representatives and other legislators out there ready to do away with the power of the state board in this type of activity.

SEVERSON: Texas purchases so many textbooks it drives the price down so much other states often buy exactly the same book. That’s why educators around the country are watching what happens here very closely.

One important thing that religion brings to politics is a certain kind of realism about human nature and human possibilities.

In private life, we all exaggerate our own virtues and expect too much from our own plans. Faith helps us to keep our pride in check, and we can depend on friends and family to do it if our faith falls short.

Photo: White House (Pete Souza)

Political leaders, whatever their personal piety may be, find this realism harder to achieve. Americans are idealists. Usually they are less realistic than their leaders and more likely to encourage overreaching than to restrain it. President Obama seems to have maintained a resolute realism during his first year in office. The question is whether he can communicate it to people who elected him for the audacity of hope.

Liberals are generally less realistic than conservatives in domestic politics. They put more stock in well-devised plans, and they are more confident of their ability to coalesce general dissatisfaction with the present situation into support for a specific policy. President Obama’s strategy for health care reform has thus been remarkable for its realistic self-restraint. He has been willing to let the plan take a form crafted by compromise, and he has the patience to see reform as the work of decades, rather than a single legislative session. A similar realism seems to guide his approach to the environment and energy. The victories have been limited, the compromises have been numerous, and those who hoped for greater justice in health care and a more sustainable environmental policy have been the most disappointed. But a realist knows there is no perfect plan and will settle for modest gains that open the way to further negotiations and future improvements.

The most impressive achievements of liberal realism have been in foreign policy. The Marshall Plan, Truman’s response to the Berlin blockade, and Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis established a pattern of forcefulness, restraint, and, above all, patience that kept the Cold War on a trajectory that left the United States the dominant global power without requiring the defeat of the enemy or igniting a nuclear holocaust. President Obama’s commitment to that legacy is apparent in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, which summarized the key points of realistic world politics: In a world where we must assume the persistence of evil, peace and justice sometimes require the deployment of force. The leaders who make those decisions must be accountable not only to their own convictions, but to the historic standards of just war and the requirements of international law.

What President Obama also warned us is that we do not yet know what this legacy of successful realism means in a post-Cold War world where the greatest threat to security is international terrorism and humanitarian crises are sparked by regimes whose nationalist or religious aims know no realistic political limits. Must we question our own righteousness so much that we let genocide continue unchecked? Does restraint require us to respect the sovereignty of countries that become havens for terrorists? The realistic balance between strategic interests and international law and the fine line that separates forceful diplomacy from the diplomatic use of force have not yet been established for these new realities.

What we can expect, if our leaders continue to be realistic, is an extended period of testing, a time in which we will have to deal with the aftermath of our mistakes as well as engage in a rigorous evaluation of apparent successes. A troop surge may be a realistic answer to insurgency that builds support for a friendly government in Kabul. Or it may not be. Either way, we will have to deal with the outcomes of today’s policy while figuring out a realistic response to the unprecedented situations that will follow when we leave Iraq and Afghanistan. Over time, if we are both skillful and lucky, this will evolve into a new kind of realism that will enable us to maintain our interests with integrity until the war on terrorism changes into some other kind of threat, just as the Cold War did. We may want a more decisive victory or a more definitive justice, but a wise leader will not expect more than that, nor promise it.

The question, then, is whether President Obama’s realistic leadership can survive the impatient American idealism that brought him into office. So far, his realist credentials seem secure, in both domestic and foreign policy. But if the people are not as patient and self-critical as he is, they will start to hope for someone who will lead them into the future with more certainty and less consultation. A religious realism about political life suggests that is one hope we should be audacious enough to resist.

Robin W. Lovin is the Cary M. Maguire University Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University.

]]>BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Welcome. I am Bob Abernethy. It’s good to have you with us. We take our look ahead now to the stories we expect to cover in the new year with the help of Jason Byassee of the Duke University Divinity School, where he directs its Faith and Leadership Project; E. J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution, the Washington Post, and Georgetown University; and with Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program. Welcome to you all. Jason, we have a recession. What’s going to happen to it, do you think, and what effect has it had and will it have on the churches, the denominations, the charities—all those people that you cover?

JAYSON BYASSEE, Duke Divinity School: I am struck by how you can’t have a conversation with a religious leader now without talking about what the financial downturn means for their organizations. This is across the board, from left to right, whatever position one has. What this means is that people are laying people off. They are cutting back on ministries. I wonder if this isn’t the story upcoming. Lots of our denominational infrastructures were built at a time when you could assume money would keep coming in. Well, it’s not now, and how do you do more with less? Nobody is quite sure how to do that.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly: Talking about doing more with less, the recession is also having a terrible impact on the people in the pews of all of these religious congregations, the people that these ministries serve. These people are hurting more than ever. They need help. They need resources. They go to the religious institutions, who are struggling. So it’s a real problem.

E.J. DIONNE, Brookings Institution: The entire not-for-profit sector has been hurt. Now, there is some hopeful evidence that sometimes some people actually step up and give a little more when they can to groups helping the very poor, because they have an even better sense than usual about “there but for the grace of God go I”—that possibility. The economy is going to be critical to so much of what happens this year. It’s going to be crucial politically to what happens in the 2010 elections. You can almost predict on a straight line if the economy feels like it’s getting substantially better by the midyear, President Obama and the Democrats are probably going to do better; if it feels like it’s not getting better it will be a large problem for them. That’ll have an effect on how we discuss all kinds of questions, including moral and religious questions, in the course of the year.

ABERNETHY: Jason, do you see people going into the ministry, or not going into the ministry, because of the recession? Do you see seminaries closing, churches closing?

Jayson Byassee

BYASSEE: The standard assumption is that when the economy is bad people go to school, because work is not good. The problem with that is, if you can’t sell your house then it’s pretty hard to move across the country and go to school. Lots of seminaries are trying to do more online education. I expect more of that to come. But there is enormous pressure, especially on small seminaries that aren’t connected to a big university, and dire predictions about how many of those may close in the coming years. That might not seem like a big thing until you realize, okay, where my minister was trained means everything for what I’m going to hear about God. This has an outsize ripple effect on institutions across the board and religion in this country, I think.

ABERNETHY: E.J., it is an election year again. What do you see as a result of that that will be of particular importance to believers?

DIONNE: I think, first of all, we may have the discussion on morality and the economy that was, I think, a little bit delayed, that people were trying to come to terms with what the downturn meant. I think there is going to be now a real look back and look forward as to why did we get into this mess—how much of it were practical problems, how much of it were about people not taking responsibilities seriously that they should have—the stewards of our economy, the people with a strong position in our economy. I think that debate will very much affect the elections. I also think we’re going to have a kind of after-effect of our big health care debate. I think what you saw among religious groups, particularly Christian religious groups, were a real difference between those who laid the heaviest stress on the moral imperative to getting everyone, or as many people as possible, covered through insurance, versus those who felt that the major emphasis on whether abortion is or is not funded and how in this health care debate. I think that’s going to have a continuing effect, because I think there is this running dialogue, certainly in the Catholic Church that I’m part of, but I think in all of our traditions, between those who believe the central emphasis of our religious group should be on a certain relatively narrow—though they would say very important—list of moral questions: abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research versus those who say that the emphasis should be on a much broader agenda having to do with social justice and how we organize our lives together in the economy. I think that discussion is going to very alive, made all the more so by the controversy of an election year.

LAWTON: It’s going to be interesting to see how involved faith-based activists get in these midterm elections. Certainly Barack Obama mobilized a very active campaign effort among especially moderate and liberal faith-based individuals. There was activity on the religious right as well against him. But will a Democratic candidate at the state level be able to get that same sense of energy? Will they come out? Meanwhile, the religious right is still really trying to figure out who they are, who’s going to lead them, and what they’re going to do. The Republicans are trying to figure out what do we do with this core of our party? So it will be fascinating to watch all of that unfold in the coming months.

DIONNE: Although I do think there’s one interesting thing that’s happened on the right, at least in the last year, which is I think the religious conservative voice has been less powerful than the voice of, whatever you want to call it, this Tea Party movement. There seems to have been a shift within the right from an emphasis on moral questions that the religious conservatives were focused on to this very strong anti-government strain. Now, obviously, there are overlaps on the conservative side, but I think this is a different sort of direction that we’ve seen on the right side of politics.

LAWTON: But we’ve seen, especially with the health care debate last year and the role abortion played within that debate, those social issues are still very important to a lot of people and will still come up, I think, in the midterm elections.

BYASSEE: Much more quietly, along with that I am struck by how many dozens of churches in my area can’t afford a minister any more because of health care being so expensive, and yet the left has somehow not managed to have the kind of energy in favor of expanding health coverage by any stretch that the right has managed to have against it, it seems to me, because of this confluence of leadership in opposition.

ABERNETHY: Kim, what do you see coming about the all the issues around gay marriage and what jobs homosexuals can have in the churches?

Kim Lawton

LAWTON: This is going to be a very important year within the worldwide Anglican Communion. The US Episcopal Church, which is the branch here of the worldwide Anglican Communion, has moved forward. The Los Angeles diocese has elected an assistant bishop who is a lesbian. The worldwide community had asked the US church please don‘t move forward on this. She would be the second one. Her election needs to be confirmed within the next few months before she would be officially installed in May, so that’s still coming up. But the world is watching in the Anglican Communion, and many people are not happy about this, so this is going to be really important. We’ve been talking for years about is the Anglican Communion going to hold together? I think this year could be very crucial on that question.

BYASSEE: It seems like the first election, you could make space for it being a naïve move, or a misstep move, if you were in opposition. A second one, you can’t make that claim any more. The striking thing to me about this election is not so much that Mary Glasspool is a lesbian, but do you really need three Episcopal bishops in Los Angeles? Again, is it a structure set up for a time when the money was flush, and now does it make sense any more?

DIONNE: I’ve thought about this the last couple of years, where we have focused so much of the debate on the issue of gays and lesbians. It strikes me that, within the Christian Church for 100-150 years there have been episodes of modernity confronting tradition and that, right now, the center of that debate is around issues related to gay rights. But when you listen to some of the conversation—why people are for or against gay rights—it’s really part of this much deeper struggle that’s been going on within Christianity for a long time of how much its task is to resist modernity versus how much of its task is to respond to modernity, if you will, in a more dialectical way, with some opposition but also embracing some of what modernity has to give us. I think this episode is just—there is a particular passion behind this, because this is obviously a major step in this long argument.

LAWTON: Another interesting aspect to this particular debate, when you are talking about the Anglican Communion, is the demographic changes of Christianity around the world. So you have Christians in Africa and Asia who have the numbers. There’s millions of Christians in Uganda and Rwanda and Sudan. These tend to be more conservative on some of these issues—much more conservative, especially on the issue of homosexuality, and where their place is in the international Christian family is very much up for grabs in this particular debate.

DIONNE: Indeed, Christianity is growing. I think it’s a great shock for people to realize that there are many more Anglicans in Africa than there are Episcopalians in the United States.

BYASSEE: There’s twice as many Anglicans in Sudan as there are in the United States—just one big country in Africa. I don’t think we’re anywhere near catching up with what this means, not only on social issues but on doctrine, worship life, and all the rest. What’s it going to mean, not very long from now, that Christianity is essentially an African religion and not a Western one, not a North American or European one?

DIONNE: You’re seeing that, to some degree, in the debate about global warming. I do think the environment is another area where we’re going to see continuing activism and debate within the churches. The presence of a very strong group of Third World Christians in all of the denominations is going to put the focus not simply on the issue of reducing carbon in the atmosphere, but also on what kind of compensation Third World countries will get, which became a very critical issue in the discussions in Copenhagen.

ABERNETHY: Let me move to another point, Kim especially. There is an investigation going on, or a review, or whatever is the right term for it, of Catholic nuns in this country by the Vatican. Where is that going, and when will we know what comes of it?

LAWTON: The Vatican says that it wants to look into the quality of life for US sisters. That has created a huge amount of consternation here in the US, as there are questionnaires that have been sent to different communities of sisters with a lot of questions. Many of them feel like we’re not going to answer some of these. So that’s going to be moving forward throughout this year, as that sort of give-and-take moves forward. Do they answer these questions? What do they say? How do they say it? What’s really behind all of these questions in the first place? That’s what a lot of people, not just among nuns but across the Catholic community, want to know. What’s really behind this study, this investigation?

E. J. Dionne

DIONNE: There’s a great danger here. I think this could prove a very, very divisive move inside the church. There is enormous affection toward nuns among people who are Catholics. Many of us owe enormous debts to them for our educations and for so many other things they did. They are among the most activist—that’s a bad term in the eyes of some conservatives—as in giving comfort to the poor, helping the sick, doing all the things the Gospel says we should do. And so they risk, I think, a real backlash, if they don’t handle this very carefully. I think they are already confronting it, to some degree. They’ve got to be very careful with the nuns. I’ve got some nuns that sent that message.

BYASSEE: It is an interesting question. If you have an enormously radical form of life, based on what Jesus said we should do, can you be liberal doctrinally? It sounds like the answer may be no, right? That’s a very risky answer…

DIONNE: The answer from the Vatican may be no. It’s not clear to me that there is, first of all, any consistent sort of liberal doctrinal positions, and to the extent that they are somewhat more liberal—for example, in asserting that perhaps there is a bigger role for women to play in the authority structure of the church—it shouldn’t surprise that perhaps that the nuns, who have taken so much responsibility for helping run the church, just might have a view like that.

BYASSEE: My wife, who is a pastor, would “Amen” your claim. I think that’s right.

ABERNETHY: Jason, you study and help identify future leaders in the churches. What do you see? Some of the familiar old names are no longer so familiar. Oral Roberts died. Where is it going? Who do you see out there who’s going to succeed the people we used to hear about so intensively with the religious right?

BYASSEE: One thing that interests me is that there’s less of an emphasis, if you’re a younger evangelical leader, on starting a parachurch ministry like Billy Graham did, and more of an emphasis on being a pastor. I’m not exactly sure why this shift has happened, but if you’re a young pastor, you’re charismatic, what you want to do is plant a church usually and grow it big and have that be where your ministry is. So I see a lot of pastors of enormous churches—in places like Seattle and Grand Rapids—who have churches of 20-30,000 people. You don’t hear about them in the national news yet. You don’t hear Rob Bell’s name. You don’t hear Mark Driscoll’s name. You’re hearing Tim Keller’s name in Manhattan more because he’s writing books that have gotten attention. Same with Rob Bell. But these are pastors who are sort of a half-generation after Rick Warren, or Bill Hybels at Willow Creek, who are going to have an enormous impact, because if you want anyone to catch a religious allusion in politics in 20-30 years, it’s likely to be because one of these pastors helped teach a congregation to hear the Scriptures, right? If people are going to be serving the poor, it’s going to be because churches like this—like Adam Hamilton’s church in Kansas City, Church of the Resurrection—encourage people to do that and made space and structure for them to do it. So I think that’s an enormous shift.

LAWTON: One thing I’m watching is, with some of the folks you just referred to that already have these big megachurches, what happens when those leaders—people like Rick Warren at Saddleback Church, people like Bill Hybels in Willow Creek, built these giant congregations—what happens when they retire, though? What happens to those congregations? It’s really hard to step in to a congregation that’s already in process. That’s something I’m really going to be looking at.

ABERNETHY: I want to hear, Jason, what you have to say, and E.J.—each of you—about kind of the state of religious life and of organized religion in this country today. How is it going? Is secularism pushing it aside? What’s happening?

BYASSEE: It does seem to me that the new atheist books gave a certain permission to people to claim that they are not religious, that you don’t have to have the default be, oh yeah, I’m a Christian, even though I don’t do anything. Now it can be no, I’m not religious, and that seems to be more socially okay. Of course, being biased people in religious institutions—I spend all my time with religious leaders for whom things are very vibrant, right—but I think we shouldn’t overlook the fact that there are a whole lot of people who aren’t engaged by the church and its ministries and would much rather they go away, especially at election time.

ABERNETHY: Sixteen percent, I think, identify themselves as having no affiliation. E.J., what do you see? How is the tide running?

DIONNE: I wrote a column some years ago that ran under the headline, which I openly took from The New Republic. The headline was “God Bless Atheists.” I think one of the things about this atheist challenge that’s actually good for believers and good for Christians is that it has created a debate on the fundamentals. I don’t mean by that fundamentalists; I just mean the fundamental tenets of does God exist? How do you know God exists? What is the relationship between God and humankind? These debates have gone on for centuries. A lot of what the new atheists say are new versions of very old arguments that have been taking place. I think it’s far better to surface these arguments than to have people either pretend to believe when they don’t, or have believers not have to confront really core challenges to belief itself. And so, at bottom, if you can say this whole debate may be providential.

LAWTON: I think we need to be careful, too, when you look at some of these numbers. A lot of those people who are unaffiliated—it doesn’t mean that they’re not religious or spiritual in some way. They’re just not necessarily associating themselves with a particular organization or institution.

BYASSEE: It does seem important that these numbers bump when there is an election that people are unhappy about. It seems like there’s been some behavior from religious people that they’re displeased by, so it seems like the 2004 election, in particular, got a bunch of people book contracts to write about how bad God is.

ABERNETHY: Kim, there are some Supreme Court decisions coming down of some interest.

LAWTON: I think this coming year will see some interesting decisions about the conflict between religion and the public square. One is the Mojave cross. Can there be giant crosses in public property? Another one that I find particularly interesting is that the Supreme Court will be looking at a case with the Christian Legal Society and whether a law school can—the Christian Legal Society has a student club and they also believe that gays should not be in their leadership or their voting members, because that’s part of their religious belief. Well, the law school where they were operating said, well, if you believe that, you can’t be part of an official student group, because we don’t discriminate based on sexual orientation. So you have this clash of religious values. On the one hand, you have people who want to exercise their religious beliefs. And then you have people who say this is a matter of human rights or civil rights. Then those start clashing. Who trumps whom? So that’ll be interesting.

DIONNE: That’s a hugely important and really fascinating case, because you’re dealing with, in a sense, two conceptions of liberty, two conceptions of whether people should be free to be gay, and no organization on the campus should discriminate against them, and one can see how one gets to that conclusion, versus the right of the Christian Legal Society to constitute themselves as a group that has a very particular view on homosexuality. I think it could be a very bitter argument, precisely because each side is going to claim—they’re going to have competing goods, as each side will claim competing notions of freedom.

ABERNETHY: E.J., quickly, what are you going to be looking forward to particularly in the coming year? What stories?

DIONNE: I am going to be looking forward to a continuing moral debate about how we should organize this economy and what got us into the mess we’re in, in the first place. I think it’s going to be a real test of whether Barack Obama’s efforts to tamp down the culture wars have us get along a little better, whether that will succeed. Like everybody else, I’m going to be looking at how the test of these last two years—how the last two years are judged by the voters in November.

ABERNETHY: I’m sorry, but our time is almost up. Many thanks to Kim Lawton, to E.J. Dionne, and to Jason Byassee. Happy New Year to each of you and to our viewers.

]]>KIM LAWTON, anchor: One of President Obama’s early moves when he took office six months ago was to establish an unprecedented new council of religious and secular leaders to advise him on faith-related social policy. Evangelical megachurch pastor Joel Hunter from Florida is part of that council. Hunter is becoming an increasingly influential leader for those he calls “a new kind of conservative.” I visited him at his church near Orlando.

KIM LAWTON: It’s Sunday morning and people are heading to church. One might expect them to be bringing along a Bible; maybe their tithes and offerings. But at Northland Church, just outside Orlando, they’re also bringing obsolete computers and printers, old stereos and other hard-to-recycle items. The evangelical megachurch has made a commitment to the environment — what members here call “creation care.” It’s part of a wide-ranging social agenda championed by Northland senior pastor Joel Hunter. He says that agenda signals a maturing of the evangelical movement.

“We want to equip people for living great lives where they are.”

Reverend JOEL HUNTER (Senior Pastor, Northland Church, Florida): We like to call it “growing up.” I think especially in the political realm we went through a phase more recently when we were known for what we were against rather than what we were for. We were pretty narrow in what we were paying attention to rather than very broad. Now that wasn’t true in Jesus’ time, because Jesus was very broad in what he did.

LAWTON: Like most evangelicals, Hunter opposes abortion and gay marriage. But his agenda also includes the environment and issues of poverty, torture, peace and interfaith dialogue. Hunter does describe himself as a pro-life registered Republican. Yet his views captured the attention of President Barack Obama. Hunter was part of a group of religious leaders who prayed privately with Obama during the campaign, and he’s now a member of Obama’s advisory council on faith-based and neighborhood partnerships.

Hunter believes evangelicals have a spiritual obligation to have a positive influence wherever God places them, even if that may be among Democrats.

Rev. HUNTER: I hope that along the way I could be of encouragement in the president’s spiritual life because that’s what a pastor does, that’s what we care about. But beyond that, I’m very excited about working with a very broad spectrum of people to see how our faith communities can really solve the problems, or help solve the problems, of this country.

LAWTON: Despite his national responsibilities, Hunter makes it clear that his base of operations is Northland. The nondenominational church was started by 11 people in 1972. Hunter, who was a United Methodist pastor, came here in 1985. Today, about 12,000 people attend the church every week. Northland calls itself “a Church Distributed.”

Rev. HUNTER: We emphasize what goes on outside the building rather than what goes on inside the building, and we want to equip people for living great lives where they are.

“Only God can move in the spirit to change somebody’s heart or to establish a relationship.”

LAWTON: The Internet helps with that distribution. Thousands of people around the world participate in the worship services through an innovative online Web cast.

Rev. HUNTER: So when we built this building, we built it as a communications device, and the selling point to the congregation was look, you’re not building a building that can just seat 3,000 people at a time. We can seat three million people at a time if we have enough broadband and we have enough people who can gather around a computer screen.

(speaking to audience): And for those of you who are worshipping with us online . . .

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Let’s hear from a couple of folks who worship with us online.

Rev. HUNTER: Somebody texted in from the last service . . .

LAWTON: Some people watch individually, others gather in small groups in people’s homes, fast-food restaurants, even a prison. Northland knows of alternative worship sites as far away as Argentina, Egypt and Ukraine. As the church grew, so did Hunter’s vision of having an impact on the wider culture. In July of 2006, he was chosen to be the new president of the Christian Coalition of America, the political advocacy group founded by Pat Robertson. But Hunter withdrew even before he took office when it became clear that coalition members were uncomfortable with his broad issue agenda.

LAWTON: Mark Pinsky is a veteran religion writer in Orlando who has covered Hunter for 14 years.

MARK PINSKY (Religion Writer): Even though he didn’t take that job, eventually he was forced out, he really won, because the issues on which he lost his job were the right issues as far as the coming evangelical movement is concerned.

LAWTON: In many ways, Hunter has become a national voice for evangelicals seeking a new style of leadership.

Mark Pinsky

Rev. HUNTER: There is a whole new generation of young evangelicals that are coming up that really don’t care about any of the labels. I mean, they could care less — Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative — they don’t care. What they care about is can we change the world for the better?

LAWTON: But Hunter still gets push-back from evangelical traditionalists.

Mr. PINSKY: He believes in making coalitions on an issue-by-issue basis, and that puts them together with, sometimes, with people who support abortion rights, for example. But there are people in the evangelical movement both in his congregation and nationally who won’t do that, who won’t sit down at the table with people they don’t agree with on other issues.

LAWTON: Hunter has also made some evangelicals uncomfortable by building coalitions with people from other faiths. He’s part of a project to improve dialogue between Islam and the West, and he advocates building strong personal relationships with people from other religions.

Rev. HUNTER: The better relationship you build, the more free you are to share with people what you really believe, and then you let God take care of the rest. It’s not my job to convert people, you know? Only God can move in the spirit to change somebody’s heart or to establish a relationship.

LAWTON: Hunter raised a lot of eyebrows when he tried to show interfaith respect at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. He was chosen to give the closing prayer after Obama’s acceptance speech. When he got to the end, he stopped and gave the crowd some instructions.

Rev. HUNTER (at DNC): On the count of three, I want all of you to end this prayer, your prayer, the way you usually end prayer.

To make somebody or to cow somebody into silence as you pray in Jesus’ name, or to somehow make them seem like they’re praying in Jesus’ name is really a sacrilege, because only Christians can pray in Jesus’ name.

Rev. HUNTER: On the one side, I had a wonderful encouragement especially from non-Christians, you know, and from many Christians who understood what I was doing. I got raked over the coals with a lot of Christians because I didn’t hijack the prayer and pray it only for Christians.

LAWTON: There are those who worry that Hunter’s relationship with Obama, and his position on the advisory council, could hinder the pastor’s ability to speak truth to power.

Rev. HUNTER: The president has made it very clear — and this is another thing I like about him — is he is not looking for “yes” people here. He’s looking for people on this council that will have a prophetic voice, and all of us made the agreement that we would not be on the council unless we could be blunt-honest.

LAWTON: Hunter acknowledges it can be a heady thing to be inside the Oval Office, and he knows power can be seductive. He tries to keep it in perspective.

Rev. HUNTER: The idea here that goes through my mind is that this is not the person that I’m going to be answering to. That’s a way higher thing, and on judgment day when I stand before God, I’m going to have to answer to what I’ve said.

LAWTON: Hunter says his family and his church life keep him grounded. He says he doesn’t seek the limelight. In fact, he really doesn’t like it at all.

Rev. HUNTER: I have no desire for people to really know who I am. I’m an — you wouldn’t believe this — but I’m an introvert. You know, I could spend all day in a library and just be perfectly content as long as my wife was one stack over.

Mr. PINSKY: No one is perfect, and he’s not perfect. He’s a man of some ambition, I think he will admit to that. But he lives his faith, he has a good family life, at least that which we can see. He doesn’t live extravagantly. He’s relatively modest in the way he lives his life, and with him I really believe what you see is what you get.

]]>Humorist Will Rogers was famous for joking, “I am a member of no organized political party. I am a Democrat.” The 2008 Democratic National Convention demonstrated just how far removed today’s Democratic Party is from that of Rogers’ day.

Yes, there was the usual on-floor and after-session partying. But this convention was more carefully orchestrated than most Democratic conventions. It was the product of angry and determined professionals — people tired of eight years of G.O.P. control of the White House.

To a large degree, convention planners succeeded. Speeches by Bill and Hillary Clinton went a long way toward mollifying diehard Hillary supporters and creating a sense of party unity. The spectacular appearance of Obama in an outdoor stadium before 70,000 adoring supporters was a political master-stroke. All of the speakers were well-coiffed and well-prepared for their pre-established roles. Democrats left the convention with good reason to expect a smashing victory in November.

On the other hand, the Democratic Convention may have left some party supporters longing for the good old days. To be sure, no one wanted a return to the chaos of 1968. But 2008 seemed to lack the authenticity of past conventions. Is Michelle Obama really the middle-class housewife portrayed in her speech? Have the Clintons really made peace with Obama? Can Obama, with his appeals to voter self-interest, truly be as inspirational as John F. Kennedy, with his appeals to altruism and self-sacrifice?

The Democrats’ authenticity issues were starkly illustrated by their valiant but controversial faith initiatives at the convention. They did their best to remove the party’s anti-faith image. Democrats organized “faith concerns” meetings led by Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Obama selected Catholic layman Joe Biden as his running mate. Nancy Pelosi presented her interpretation of Catholic abortion policy on Meet the Press. Speakers made use of religious rhetoric.

Yet nagging doubts about the Democrats’ seemingly newfound commitment to religion remained, especially among the conservative evangelical voters who are so crucial to electoral success, particularly in southern states. One reason is that, despite the welter of news stories about the emerging evangelical “center” with a social justice agenda, Democrats differ strongly with evangelicals on the two issues that continue to matter most to Protestant (and Catholic) conservatives — abortion and gay rights.

Efforts to downplay or explain away these differences proved difficult and even embarrassing, as when the Archbishop of Washington took sharp issue with Nancy Pelosi’s interpretation of Catholic theology. Prominent black and Jewish leaders challenged the party on issues ranging from abortion to school choice. And Cameron Strang, founder of RELEVANT, a Christian magazine for twenty-somethings, embarrassed party leaders by refusing to give the closing benediction on the first day of the convention.

So how should one evaluate the success or failure of the Democrats’ faith initiative? On the negative side, the efforts seemed strained and unlikely to convince religious conservatives to vote for Obama. On the other hand, the Democrats do not need to win most of the conservative evangelical vote to win in 2008; they simply need to erode G.O.P. support among group members. In that, they may have succeeded.

Some conservative evangelicals may give Democrats grudging credit for addressing religious issues, even if done in a somewhat clumsy fashion. More moderate evangelicals may, to some extent, be attracted by Democratic efforts to appeal to the strong social justice tradition of American Protestantism. But perhaps even more important, particularly in the long run, may be the Democrats’ efforts to appeal to growing nontraditional religious groups, such as Muslims, as well as to social justice-oriented mainline Protestants.

John McCain’s selection of culturally conservative Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate may indeed reduce the numbers of evangelical defectors in 2008. But, in the longer term, the
Democrats’ newfound religion may work to the party’s advantage, provided that voters can be convinced the party’s religious appeals are genuine and not a cynical ploy to attract “the faithful.”

— James M. Penning is director of the Center for Social Research and professor of political science at Calvin College.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Across the political and theological spectrums, religious conservatives, moderates, and liberals all have their own hopes for the president’s second term. Some conservatives say it’s payback time for their support in the election. Others say, “Don’t forget the poor.”

Kim Lawton has our story today on America’s religious agendas.

KIM LAWTON: In his State of the Union Address, President Bush outlined his plans and goals for the future. The next morning, at the National Prayer Breakfast, the president acknowledged the importance of praying for wisdom in guiding the country.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Prayer means more than presenting God with our plans and desires. Prayer also means opening ourselves to God’s priorities.

LAWTON: Conservative evangelicals and Catholics are optimistic this bodes well for their policy priorities. Many in those communities worked hard for Bush’s reelection and are now confident he will move ahead on the issues they care about most.

Dr. RICHARD LAND (President, Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission): The expectations are very high among my constituency that this president is going to do his best to fulfill his promises. We believe this president to be a man who keeps his word. And he’s a man who not only understands our issues, he shares our worldview.

LAWTON: Democratic activist John Podesta is part of a growing movement of faith-based moderates and liberals who pledge to counter many of the positions religious conservatives are pushing for.

JOHN PODESTA (President and CEO, Center for American Progress): They formed, certainly, the backbone of the people who were out on the streets trying to get the president reelected. And they’re asking for a lot, but I think they’re asking for things that the American people really don’t want. I think they have a very cramped view, I think, of what the critical issues in front of the country are.

LAWTON: As president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Land says he sees several priorities for Bush’s second term.

Dr. LAND: My community, Southern Baptists and other evangelicals, want the president to strongly defend traditional marriage by giving presidential support to a marriage protection amendment. We want the president to continue to strongly push a pro-life agenda, and to support pro-life legislation that will be introduced in the House and the Senate, and to continue to promote freedom and democracy.

LAWTON: Their confidence may be high, but some evangelical leaders are cautioning against a “payback time” mentality.

Reverend RICHARD CIZIK (Vice President, Governmental Affairs, National Association of Evangelicals): Our values are the president’s values, but we simply can’t run roughshod all over Washington. Evangelicals, yes, we have a right to expect a response from Congress and the White House, but we also have to be, yes, as Christians, magnanimous.

LAWTON: There are still many political realities in Washington. At last month’s March for Life, Bush promised to continue his support for what he called a “culture of life,” although he offered no specifics. He repeated that during his State of the Union Address, although he never mentioned the word “abortion.” Evangelical leaders are urging new restrictions on abortion, but they concede those restrictions are modest ones.

Rev. CIZIK: They’re admittedly not overturning ROE V. WADE. They’re addressing it at the margins. But that’s what we expect.

LAWTON: There are also political uncertainties surrounding a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman — an issue that galvanized many conservative voters in November.

During the State of the Union speech, the president reaffirmed his support for the amendment. Still, some conservatives are dismayed that Bush is focusing so much more on Social Security reform.

Dr. LAND: Among the social conservatives there’s not the kind of consensus for Social Security reform that you have, for instance, on protecting marriage between a man and a woman, or on the pro-life issue.

LAWTON: Senate leaders have not included the marriage amendment among their top legislative priorities, and conservatives say it will take presidential pressure to help get the two-thirds majority needed to pass it.

Dr. LAND: We do not want any wavering on an amendment to the Constitution to protect marriage from a runaway imperial judiciary in the United States.

LAWTON: While much of the rhetoric focuses on abortion and gay marriage, some leaders say there is much more on the evangelical agenda.

Rev. CIZIK: We want action, for example, to address religious liberty, democracy-building overseas, and religious liberty on the faith-based initiative here in the States — broadening that at the state and local level. We would like action, yes, on poverty issues and on the environment. So we have a broad agenda. And don’t typify us all simply by the term which is for us at times derogatory: “religious Right.” We are mainstream America.

LAWTON: But Cizik ultimately believes that much of the future agenda hinges on success in Iraq.

Rev. CIZIK: The biggest issue, even for evangelicals, is Iraq. And if the elections, if the democracy-building project — as we call it — in Iraq fails, it may well be that this president’s legacy fails.

LAWTON: Other religious groups also say they have a broad range of priorities for the second term. The U.S. Catholic bishops, for example, have on their list opposition to gay marriage, abortion, and embryonic stem cell research, but they also include support for a host of social justice issues.

John Podesta, a Catholic, is trying to mobilize religious progressives through the Center for American Progress.

Mr. PODESTA: There are a lot of people who go back to those traditional values that you find in the Bible that talk about poverty, that talk about economic justice, that talk about concern for the poor and the left behind and the left out in society, and I think what needs to happen is that those issues have to be brought back to the public square, if you will.

LAWTON: Some of the biggest concerns are over Social Security reform, which many religious moderates and liberals fear will dismantle the social safety net. Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

Rabbi DAVID SAPERSTEIN (Director, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism): The moral test of any civilized nation is what it does for the weak, the least among us, to use the Christian terminology — the widow and the orphan, the child and the elderly. If our policies do not create zones of protection for those people, we have failed to live up to our biblical mandates.

Mr. PODESTA: Where [Bush is] going on health care and Social Security, on taxation, putting all the benefits to the very wealthiest Americans and denying essential services to the poorest Americans, I think we’re going to have to fight with him — quite a bit.

LAWTON: Big fights are expected over judicial nominees and, in particular, any new appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court. Social conservatives see this as a vital issue that will affect all their other priorities. They will strongly oppose what they call “activist judges who legislate from the bench.”

Rev. LAND: We want justices like Clarence Thomas and justices like Antonin Scalia. We want judges like those justices, and the president has said that’s what he wants. And so, it would be a grave disappointment to me if we were to get people like David Souter.

LAWTON: Religious liberals are gearing up to strongly oppose any scaling back of rights granted by recent court decisions.

Rabbi SAPERSTEIN: What would disappoint me most is to unravel the great achievements of the 20th century, to reshape the federal courts in a way that abandons the extraordinary transformative expansion of fundamental rights that made life so much better for women and for all minorities in America, including religious minorities, by their assertion of a strong wall that keeps government out of religion.

LAWTON: Despite their concerns in many areas, faith-based moderates and liberals do see areas for common cause with the president. Rabbi Saperstein says he is particularly optimistic about the Middle East peace process in the wake of new Palestinian leadership.

Rabbi SAPERSTEIN: With the election of Abbas, it is really possible now that we could get the parties back to the table. This administration seems committed to investing financially, politically, to make that happen.

LAWTON: Saperstein and others in his movement are hoping to build on the president’s initiatives on human rights and international religious freedom, debt relief, foreign aid, and fighting the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Rabbi SAPERSTEIN: If he is open to listening to good ideas from across the political spectrum and seeking to heal the country of its divisions by governing from the center, on both domestic and foreign policy issues, there’s a lot that we can do together.

LAWTON: Religious groups say they’ll get an even clearer picture of the president’s agenda in his proposed budget for 2006. That’s scheduled to be presented to Congress this coming week. Faith-based lobbyists say they will examine the document closely to see what the administration will be focusing on in coming months.